Work Text:
HEAVENLY, HELLISH FEATHERS OF PURGATORY
By Yingfei
© February 2021.
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"Sought by the greed of men since the dawn of humankind, but only bestowed upon the women whose fate it forever scars—the Witchblade. Is it the righteous sword of God? Or hand of the Devil himself? Now, a new bearer has been chosen, and she must discover the answers for herself. As she stands on the brink of destiny, she is forced to seek the balance between ecstasy and ruin."
—Witchblade Prologue.
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i: peaceful summer
HER NAME IS YASUKA OHARA, and she is a lonely, lonely girl.
At sixteen, her days as an orphan at the Natsukiseki Orphanage despite that are spent around an abundance of people, the brunette becoming somewhat of a teacher in the making, from showing the orphans younger than her how to stack pieces for Tangram puzzles in quick fashion to teaching the orphans about her age and above the tricks of chess and checkers and the easily-to-manipulate loopholes within the 9x9 grids of Sudoku.
She is called a “mother” of the younger orphans. There are different kinds of “mothers” among them—Sukewa for example, a girl one year her senior, is the “mother for the babies”.
In all the years Yasuka has known her, Sukewa has never once refused to feed, bathe, or change the infants and toddlers when asked. Sukewa even has a part-time job as a babysitter for the more wealthy citizens of their town Yotsukaido and the next town over called Yachimata, spending hours traveling by bus back and forth from the two cities of the Chiba Prefecture, all in an effort to increase funds for the orphanage to increase more informative school books for the elementary-aged kids and safer, well-nutritional formulas for the babies.
Another girl by the name of Konoru, who is the same age as Yasuka, is called the “mother of melodies”. Konoru can play the cello and the piano and gives anyone interested 30-minute lessons every two days when Sister McFinley (an Irish foreigner who joined the orphanage out of duty and compassion after an adult who was a former orphan at Natsukiseki visited Ireland and told her of his story), who plays and teaches all that as well as the bass and trumpet, is unavailable.
When Yasuka once asked Konoru how she became so skilled at the cello and piano, Konoru told her that her mother was a cellist and her father a pianist themselves who made her take lessons for both every day that she used to dread.
(It was not surprising to Yasuka of Konoru’s backstory—two nights after Konoru became a member of the orphanage six years ago, all spent with her crying and sobbing because her parents had been killed in a plane crash a few weeks before and none of her distant relatives wanted to adopt her, Yasuka remembers hopping out of bed to get a glass of water and seeing Konoru in the music room near the kitchen spending hours playing a somber, sentimental tune on Sister McFinley’s piano, one that Yasuka would later know to be Nocturne in C Sharp Minor No. 20.)
Yasuka meanwhile is dubbed the “mother of wits and food”. While she mostly focuses on ensuring the other students are using the resources they have to learn as much as they can, she also is able to cook a plentiful amount of food, all learned from years of watching the faculty members and helping them prepare a majority of the food for the younger orphans.
When it is her week to help the staff and guardians of the home in cleaning, she spends hours in the afternoon standing on the tip-toes of her semi-worn out flats, feather dusting the edge of every wall and eradicating spider webs, mopping and sweeping the dirt that frequently builds up and hides in the floor’s corner of every hallway, the whole time talking to other girls her age on duty like the identical twins Hanami and Fuyune and going over up any spots they didn’t clean all the way.
When it is her week to do the laundry, the sixteen-year-old makes sure each and every bedsheet and underwear and shirt is without a speck of leftover dirt and residue before she goes outside and hangs them on the clothesline.
There are days where she and Mayu and Takeshi—the other teens usually on duty for laundry the same day as her—have friendly competitions to see who can fold and deliver laundry the fastest, and there are days where the two girls of the trio reprimand and scold (Yasuka softly while Mayu roughly) Takeshi for being too rough in removing clothes from the twisted Manila rope and clippers securing them.
Her favorite chore to do by far is cooking, however. She usually ends up having to do all of it due to Norito despite not being bad at cooking choosing to be leisure and eat rather than work and Airi burning most of the food she attempts to make, but Yasuka doesn’t mind. Norito’s smile on his face as he takes many taste tests and Airi writing down notes and how-tos makes it okay, and the two other teens at the end of the day are respectively entertaining and nice,
Her nights are spent in a room with 19 other girls, 10 bunk beds meant to fit 2 girls each. Yasuka sleeps in the top bunk that’s the farthest from the door, and the girl in the bottom bunk—Shizuko who, despite her name’s meaning, is one of the loudest and talkative girls at Natsukiseki—always talks to her about artwork and places she’d like to go and astrology and whatnot until Kaguya, who is the bottom bunk two beds away, tells her to shut up and the two then argue until Kaguya’s top bunkmate, Wakana, tells them both to shut up and everything is quiet.
She is surrounded by people constantly. She is always conversing and praised. She is always having smiles thrown at her and she is never treated like a third wheel. Not once has she even been treated badly, either by the other kids or the caretakers.
So why do I still feel so, so lonely? she thinks to herself before she remembers where she’s in.
That’s right. She’s an orphan. For the past sixteen years, Yasuka has only known Natsukiseki as her home and the only place she’ll be fully welcomed.
Her mother Kanade Ohara, known for being a lady of the night and always covered with tons of fake Ruby jewelry, that accidentally got pregnant by a client and could not afford an abortion. Her mother had gone into labor in one of the many alleyways of Tokyo’s streets and a worker at the orphanage—Mr. Minamoto, who used to be in the army overseas in America before becoming a staff member at the orphanage—happened to pass by as he was walking to visit family.
After Yasuka came out, her mother had a meltdown because she had no idea what was going to do with her, and explained her backstory to Mr. Minamoto. Mr. Minamoto quickly informed Kanade of his job and after a few paperwork was able to secure Yasuka a spot at Natsukiseki.
Yasuka learned all about this two years ago, when she had one day walked in on Mr. Minamoto in his room and his jaw was wide and eyes were bulged, staring intentionally at a news piece about a prostitute with beautiful but false ruby earrings and bracelets who was found stabbed and burned alive, that semen DNA samples and a few interviews quickly proved were caused by one of her top client—whose relationship with said prostitute developed into a mistress-cheating husband one—who was enraged that his wife had found out about the affair and planned to divorce him.
When it comes to Yasuka’s father, she had found out that much like the guy who killed her mother, her father was a businessman. His name was Yasuto Chiba. After looking him up a bit and finding his address. She convinced an older kid who could drive by the name of Ryoichi to drive her to Tokyo.
Looking back, she wishes she never went on the journey, for when she got to her father’s marvelous and large traditionally-styled home, the second the door she repeatedly knocked on was open and came face to face with him, he told her quietly so that his wife and three kids much younger than Yasuka couldn’t hear that he knew why she was there, he remembers who her mother was and that he wanted nothing to do with Yasuka—
When she begged for him to rethink his decision to have nothing to do with her and told him that her name was Yasuka and that her mother naming her based on him had to mean something to him, he told her to change her name when she got older and slammed the door in her face.
(The whole ride back, Ryoichi had one hand on the wheel and the other hand on Yasuka’s back to pat it as she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.)
Not only was one parent dead and the other competent pretending she doesn’t exist but, as her age showed, she was not and would probably never be adopted. Mr. Minamoto said that as a baby she was always crying and sick and that potential parents for her did not want what they deemed a “permanently sick infant”.
When she was a child, Yasuka was not yet academically and logically skilled or an established cook, and combined with her brown hair and standard-length brown hair, she was a plain little girl and just another child with not the best of luck.
Now, as a teenager only two years away from adulthood, it would be pointless for her to expect to have parents that’ll swoop in and adopt her. Infants and babies and toddlers and children are what adults are looking for, especially the parents from wealthy families that need to take in a small child that they can easily pass off as their own in order to cover up the wife’s fertility issues.
A teenage orphan is just someone who has too many years parentless and shaping themselves to have a new life, for many visitors to the orphanage.
A few months ago when her sixteenth birthday came and a large party was made, most of the kids and staff went on and on on how much they were grateful for her care and dedication to everything she does. The cake was vanilla-chocolate and covered with oreos and bits and pieces of cookies, just the way Yasuka would like. She got multiple gifts from the staff, including a beautiful red blouse from Mrs. Fujioka. Beautiful, with soft cotton that smelt like roses and tulips.
Yet, here Yasuka is now, sitting outside at midnight, thinking about how lonely she feels. All the love in the orphanage cannot replace a mother’s existence and a father’s love.
No matter how many gifts and compliments she got, her mother’s death and father not only refusing to acknowledge her outside of a few contented words but him moving on is too strong with its hold on her mind, heart, and soul. She was seen as a mistake in her mother’s eyes and is a mistake in her father’s. There is no home for her but the Natsukiseki.
She is a lonely, lonely child, and there exists not an existing mother or a loving father for her.
✦
✦ † ✦
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On the day of the Great Quake, Yasuka and the other kids and teens at the orphanage are on a field trip with their advisors and orphanage faculty members—just having come off a highway moments ago from their small town of Yotsukaido into the heavily populated and festive downtown Tokyo area—to the National Museum of Nature and Science in order to watch an exhibition for a rare whale that has recently been founded.
They have six custom busses whenever field trips occur, and Yasuka is sitting in one of them right next to Mr. Minamoto in the front, the main chaperone of the event.
Yasuka is pointing to him sections of the map that she is unfamiliar with, for the next time he visits his family, he will introduce Yasuka as a teenager he will soon be adopting, and he wants to know if she’ll want to go to any stores.
The younger kids are joyfully screaming and play-fighting in the middle of the bus while the older kids are singing to old risqué folklore songs and playing in a large round of solitaire. Yasuka can hear the frustrated groans of Shizuko as Kaguya manages to one-up her again in the card game.
The staff of the orphanage is at the front, some of them like Mr. Minamoto with an older kid at tow to either guide them or receive guidance pertaining to Tokyo.
The whole bus is filled with all types of euphoric and light-hearted commotion, and it is for that reason that Yasuka finds it so, so ironic and cruel that when everything falls apart and breaks to miserable and sinister dust, she feels nothing.
When the bus makes it about four or five blocks away from the National Museum, no one knows what is happening when the whole sky slowly hits powerfully erupts in white and the ground below them shakes as if it’s all going to shoot out high above.
All they know is that buildings—even the tallest and sturdiest of them all—start falling and breaking apart, some parts landing in the many vehicles in front of the bus that Yasuka is in and other parts falling in the many vehicles behind the busses, including one bus completely.
Everyone at first is so shocked that all sound dies off and no one makes a peep. Then, Yasuka hears Airi scream that one falling building looks like it’s going to fall on them which causes dozens of children to start crying. The other vehicles all around them are already covered in sizable amounts of large pieces of walls and building structures, the debris the color of crimson. The shaking of the ground out of nowhere escalates dozens and dozens of levels higher than it already was at.
The bus tilts to its left and small debris that have fallen start coming in and crashing at the window. A scream and shouts of pure horror signify to Yasuka without turning around (she is too afraid she is too afraid she is too afraid she is too afraid she is too afraid) that a piece of glass has gone straight through the eye of one of the younger kids and that their brain matter has landed on several other kids around them.
“CLIMB YOUR WAY OUT AND RUN AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE!” Mr. Minamoto screams to everyone as he lifts up his left arm and shields Yasuka and a few others from a flying tire. His limb is bruised and sprained—Sister McFinley quickly takes her wimple off her head (there is so much blood around that Yasuka cannot tell the difference between the nun’s red curls and the cruor from all over) and ties it around Mr. Minamoto’s arm—but he still is standing with a determined face.
Anyone not severely or dead does just as Mr. Minamoto orders them to do, some quickly succeeding and already running to different blocks, a few managing to get far away without an issue while some either fall into large cracks below caused by the natural disaster or get hit by debris and grotesque lose their limbs and bleed to death. She recognizes Wakana as the specific person who ends up falling halfway into open space on the pavement and cracking her neck all the way and Takeshi as someone that gets impaled in the chest and flung to a faraway building as a street light collides with him.
Mr. Minamoto swings his backpack on Yasuka and pushes so that she is closer to the window, his face full of sorrow and regret.
“Follow where they’ve gone. If you are the only survivor once you reach a safe point, I want you to use the ID in the bag to head to America and go look for a retired army general by the name of Julius Kempman in Miami, Florida. Tell him you’re a child who was raised by Eisuke. When I was in the army, he and I were co-commanders in the same section. He’ll be able to get custody of you and a few of the other kids as well.”
As Mr. Minamoto wipes the tears from his face, Yasuka’s eyes widen, and her body shakes.
“W-W-Why are you speaking like that, Mr. Minamoto? You have to come too—”
“No. I must make sure everyone that has not been kille—that still has a chance is out before me. Take it and go.”
“But—”
Hugging her tightly, Mr. Minamoto whispers to her, “You will always be my daughter, official or not,” and then throws her halfway out. Yasuka crawls her way out and turns, watching as Mr. Minamoto gives a somber smile and, along with the other staff members, tries to push some remaining kids out—
Yasuka hears the shout of someone—Konoru, perhaps, but it is hard to tell with the voice so strained and interrupted with deep bloody coughs here and there—who has already been close to turning a block for her to move on and move out the way, but Yasuka chooses instead of crawl her way back towards the window Mr. Minamoto made her escape out of.
When she reaches out her hands towards the window in a slow fashion, however, she feels something, something that tells her to get in quickly and duck, and in an instant, she stumbles her way back inside and ducks low on the floor, right in front of the immobile-and-missing-the-whole-left-side-of-her-body of Hanami and immobile-and-missing-the-whole-right-side-of-her-body of Fuyune.
She sees Minamoto look at her and he is angry—“Yasuka, no! I can’t lose you too!” he tells her as he holds in his arms the barely-alive body of an armless and earless Norito—and is telling her to leave, to survive, to live, but she cannot.
Mr. Minamoto will be her dad. She is not allowing him to stay and die. She is not allowing any of them to stay and die, infact. As she runs towards him and attempts to reason with him, she ensures this thought in her mind.
They will all survive this and she will cook for Norito to smile and go back to see how many chairs that Hanami and Fuyune have sometimes purposely and sometimes unintentionally not cleaned and will laugh as Mayu is all fire in the face and ready to throw Takeshi across the backyard for messing up the whites with the colors and darks and telling Shizuko what moves she can do that’ll have Kaguya finally lose to her in a game of mancala and view Wakana preparing a traditional dance inspired by Konoru’s original cello piece and get down get down why is no one noticing that building falling get down get down get down dad no you can’t leave me too get down get down get down get do—
…
It’s funny, really.
Despite her passion to see Mr. Minamoto as her dad in the future, to the point where she risked her own life just to if not escape with him at least die with him, she feels nothing when the nearby hospital building finally crashes on their bus and the bus is crushed deeply as well as flipped several times before being drowned in debris and blood.
She feels nothing like the hospital entrance building swings inside the bus and brutally tears Mr. Minamoto’s head off, his glasses breaking into pieces and falling into the open mouth of Norito, who quickly chokes to death on them and gurgles up blood and pieces of his throat, and the blood from both of them splattering unto Yasuka’s feet.
She feels nothing at the fact that she saw Sukewa, who had finally be able to make a child be brave enough to escape, not only have a face of shock as that said child is impaled in the neck and forehead by a broken window but as the broken window comes to her and cleanly cuts off her chest from her body.
She feels nothing as she sees half of the bus torn apart from below and Kaguya pushes a petrified Shizuko and a crying child out of the way (Kaguya screams something about finally finding the toy that the child had come back to the bus to retrieve and that Shizuko needs to take some window to escape) and passing an octopus-like stuffed animal to the child as a boulder comes down and cuts Kaguya clean in half.
Most of all, she feels nothing when what seems like a ruby-having bracelet hits her right on the side of the head, only wondering why despite only being a bracelet it had a force as if she was hit by a train, as well as why she seems physically uninjured or affected by the impact before she passes out.
When she (who is she and where is she?) wakes up, she’s in front of a fountain, and something tells her to start walking in the direction of a hospital she sees nearby, even though she has no clue as to why she was in the area in the first place.
She has no clue as to why there is a crying infant in her arms or a journal in the left pocket of her pants—but when disaster-rescuers witness her stumbling along and come to her aid she’s shielding and protecting the child nonetheless—or on what to answer when she is asked if she knew any of the people in the nearby semi-crushed school-busses full of deformed and dead bodies.
They take her to a safe-zone shelter far, far away, full of crying barely-alive kids and screaming men and women getting surgery and wraps around their injuries. On a stretcher is a blood-all-over-her Caucasian woman with reddish-curly hair that nurses keep calling a nun. She points her left hand—which is missing every finger except the index one—to her, and the nurses surrounding the non-Japanese women roll her over to her.
The supposed nun is mumbling incoherent and panicked things in another language—the words seems to be of a European origin—and one of the rescuers that brought the brown-haired teen whispers something to the nun that makes the nun’s eyes go wide and beg her in sudden high-level Japanese to remember a man by the name of Eisuke, and then points to the teen’s right hand.
For a second, the infant holding girl swears there’s a bracelet with a ruby like jewel around her right wrist, but as quickly as she sees it, it is suddenly not there, and thus she concludes it to be hallucinations due to her head injury.
The woman goes into a seizure and blood starts pouring out of her mouth and nose, and despite all the nurses and doctors that come rushing in to try to do so, the woman dies of the sudden attack.
(With a baby in her arms, that started crying the second the red-headed woman had went into a seizure, she—some of the rescuers have dubbed her “the young mother” now—hopes that the woman is able to rest in peace, and wonders how a foreigner was able to speak with such perfect dialect.)
ii: child of pears
Her name is Rihoko Amaha—nicknamed Riko for short—and she is the sweetest thing in the world.
Her laughs are so adorable and music to her ears that on even the darkest of days, she has been able to cheer up all in her vicinity.
Her facial expressions always shine with wonder and admiration, and her adorable little fingers’ attempts to grasp at every single thing that interests her was a sight to see.
At only three years old, Riko already seems to have a love for spices and herbs that she sees in the display mirrors of small grocery stores, her tiny mouth always watering and babbling especially at Shichimi Chilli Powder Miso Soybean Paste.
Whenever free clinic check-ups are available and she wanders off to the toy section, she always chooses the mini-roller coaster beads and shorting-cube toys over the stuffed animals and do-it-yourself coloring books. Parents of other toddlers have complimented this.
As her mother, Masane Amaha can’t help but be proud and constantly imagine a future where her daughter is the first female prime minister, cooking as many meals as she will be forming orders and policies in favor of the people of Japan.
She’s sure without a doubt that this child of hers will be the death of her—she’s just so cute and sweet and oh so perfect! She couldn’t think of a nicer little girl.
Even at times when the toddler has gotten Masane in hot water—such as when she once attempted to push a boiling pot of soup at the previous homeless center they were at—the woman couldn’t bring herself to be too strict. The puppy-eyes of her little one are much, much too strong, their brownness despite being such a common color able to have a uniqueness that always catches Masane’s eyes.
Her eyes are balanced out by her smooth blackish-purple hair—and as to how she gained such purplish-black tresses, Masane has no clue. Masane herself has an unruly and boyish like short-hair that’s as boringly cedar-shaded as her eyes. She’d say that maybe Riko inherited it from her father, but for the life of her, she cannot remember a single thing about Riko’s father.
She cannot remember anything about the birth of Riko or the pregnancy, and in fact, she cannot remember anything about either her daughter or herself beyond 3 years ago. All she can remember is that she was her daughter that she was protecting from the falling buildings and flipped cars that the Great Quake caused, and that there was a foreign nun who before succumbing to her injuries and a violent seizure spoke in perfect Japanese to her to remember a name—
As luck would have it, however, she cannot remember anything about the name the non-Japanese woman begged her to not forget. She could only remember the name that was on the tiny bracelet that her little girl had on her left wrist—Rihoko—and days later according to the government, that her name was Masane Amaha.
It annoyed her heavily at first, not being able to connect the dots. The amount of clouds and black spots that she almost felt like she drowned in whenever she tried to remember at least one thing about her life and who she was before the Great Quake.
Overtime, however, she began to put it more and more aside. The doctors she has gone to the last 3 years have all said that her amnesia is so severe that she will most likely never be able to remember a single moment of her life before her injury, so she should just instead focus on the future.
As bad as it is for her to do so, Masane reluctantly has put it at the bottom of things that she needs to solve. It still bugs her from time to time, but she has learned to let the frustrations and sorrows over her inability to gain back her memories not take over her whole life.
Besides, there are more important things in her life now, such as making sure that the Nswf’s Child Welfare Agency doesn’t find out that she was kicked out of her mini-apartment and is now forced to be back in a domestic shelter. The second they find out, they’ll be on her case again and will be able to take Riko from her, so she’s sitting at an outside bus-stop behind a forest of large trees, Riko sleeping in her lap.
In the next eight minutes, the Lavender-go bus will arrive and take her to Asahikawa Station that’s 20 minutes away, and by the time she arrives at the station, she’ll have 4 minutes to rush to the lower areas in order to take a train to Hokkaido, or she’ll have to wait at least one or two more hours—and what’s not to say that the Child Welfare Agency section of the National Science & Welfare Company won’t be able to track her and interrogate her to get enough reasons to remove her custody of Riko?
She won’t let them. She’d rather die than allow Riko to get in a foster-care system. She’d try to escape to another country, but the Child Welfare Agency was able to use Masane’s amnesia and constant lack of stable household income and etc to prevent her from being able to leave Japan without permission from them or a Child Welfare Agency worker with her.
For now, until she is able to afford to get someone from the black market that could smuggle an amnesiac young adult and a toddler, she must just focus on remembering to never let any signs of her financial struggle and inability to find a stable living area go out.
✦
✦ † ✦
✦
When Masane first becomes officially the active host of Witchblade, she thinks it’s a blessing.
Masane and Riko were kicked out of yet again another women’s domestic shelter, and the shelter decided to inform the NswF’s Child Welfare Agency—if Masane didn’t want anymore issues with the NswF trying to take Riko, she’d go back to that domestic shelter and punch every one of those two-faced “helpers” in the face—that Masane’s living circumstances were now completely unfit for her to continue having custody of her daughter.
Masane wasted no time in grabbing Riko, anything the six year old wanted to carry around in her little animal backpack and coin-purse, and getting enough money for a boat ride from Futtsu to Tokyo, which was surprisingly going very well in recovery from the events of The Great Quake.
She had gotten some food for her and Riko and planned to head further into the deeper parts of the city, but as luck would have it, that wretched Satoko Sakurai social worker and her gang of policemen had managed to track her down.
The agency had brought her to one of their departments in Tokyo, discussed to her that Riko would now be in their custody, and left her with the warning that she would be charged with kidnapping and refusal to obey authorities.
She stole a police car and attempted to get Riko back anyway.
Ending up in a cell and with even less of a chance to be able to have permanent custody of her daughter, Masane was expecting to lose all chances of proving despite Tokyo’s new laws that she was fit to continue to have Riko under his care and that the NswF would file a restraining order against Masane that would force her to not even be in the same prefecture as her six year old.
What she was not expecting was to be in the situation she is now—fighting a demonic monster while wearing a scandalous, succubus like attire digging into her so much that she’s worried she’s going to start getting cuts and stabs if it’s on any longer—or that a bracelet would not only appear for a second on her right wrist but would grow into a gauntlet like yet skin-tight grayish-purple fit with sharp ends that could slice anything in its way.
Her one short and dull hair now long, crimson, and even more spiky than it already was, and as the monster falls to the ground and leaks whatever the hell she guesses must be its equivalent of blood, she says in an uncharacteristically sadistic tone, “Sorry, bud’, but you just don’t do it for me.”
(She has no clue what made her say that or why it is like ecstasy that runs through her veins as she stands in front of the dying creature.)
She turns back to her normal self and in fear crawls her way to an alley, and passes out.
When Masane wakes up, the first thing she notices is the bracelet she thought she saw six years ago and the one she knows she saw hours ago, in fact, is real—and the second thing she notices is glasses-wearing, smiling man with a plate holding orange juice and tamago sando.
From then she learns that the bracelet attached to her is not a beautiful accessory but instead an artifact by the name of Witchblade that has spent centuries being used by dozens and dozens of women all over the world, born from the divine intentions of the artifact known as the Angelus and the demonic creation known as the Darkness.
She also learns that she was saved by a man by the name of Reiji Takayama, the Bureau Chief of Douji Group Industries that is tracking down and destroying monsters they created that were accidentally released known as the abomination—X-cons—Masane had earlier fought to the death with, and apparently, Takaya’s industry makes the monsters themselves for the purpose of the Witchblade and other things that Masane half hears and half doesn’t because as soon as Takayama mentions that she’ll be working under the guise of being an employee at Douji Group Industries, she is only thinking, This can get me a decent condominium in Tokyo and a stable income, right?
She had been declining his offer until he mentioned a stable income. A stable income meant an income that would get a house. A house meant that the NswF would leave her alone.
She’d be able to possibly get her little Riko permanently in her custody.
From then on, Masane begins her life as the current wielder of the Witchblade, killing enemies and transforming as if she’s a personification of blood-oriented drive and gaining enough profit and income that, after showing evidence that she was not only employed but was able to get reasonable income that would ensure a stable lifestyle for Riko, gets child welfare services off her back and her sweet little daughter in her hands again.
Masane manages to find a place at the Natsuki Condominium Building—which she learns Riko had escaped to while Masane was having her first taste of inflicting imbrued injuries with the blades and mini-edges of her transformed attire’s armlet—and becomes a resident of the living quarters owned by Mariko Natsuki, a short, chubby and seductively-dressed batista who works at the Marry Galley’s Dining Bar on the first floor of the apartments and scolds Masane on days she comes late while pinching Riko’s cheeks and telling her that she can have all the sweets and desserts she wants.
The other residents include a freelance photographer by the name of Yusuke Tozawa who by snooping around realize she has the Witchblade and asks her tons of questions (and makes sure to get pictures for the newspaper without revealing her identity, typical agency-free cameraman) and oh so obviously is trying his hardest to not spend his whole time looking at her chest in every conversation, Mr. Cho who has been hacking for decades and started the trend of calling her “Melony” (if he wasn’t so old she’s sure she’d go drop kick him by now), and Naomi, a gothic fortune-teller whose predictions are as accurate as she is a shy flower, always stuttering and ready to cry once Mr. Cho’s jokes get too risque or Mariko tells the bang-having woman to grow a stronger backbone and tear Mr. Cho a new one.
A chaotic bunch, those other residents are, though with all the events that’s led to Masane and Riko to be at the apartment, Masane can’t throw much rocks from her glass house.
There’s a few hurdles to get used to fighting off X-cons and there’s something really creepy with how...sexual some of her actions and words and thoughts become in her Witchblade form, but Riko is back in her hands and for once they’re not having dinner in soup-kitchens or in the cheapest and most run-down “stores” possible, and Masane feels relieved that her daughter can now use proper pots and high-quality seasons and rice and meat to make ochazuke and omuraisu, because Masane for the life of her cannot cook even if it was to save her own life.
Things are different, and things are nowhere to what she’d thought it be, but this is a life she thinks will ensure that she’ll never again having to be going in and out of women's shelter and relying on low-discount ramen cups and hiding between prefectures of the Kanto regions and doing meager jobs just to get Riko away from child service groups. She is stable for once in her life since the Great Quake.
Very soon, however, she realizes that she was confident about her new life too soon and starts to wonder if it’s most accurate to think of the blade as a curse.
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✦ † ✦
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Things start becoming questionable after she clashes with two women with blades like hers—the primrose like one with a stoic and yamato nadeshiko like flare and an aqua-themed, bloodlusting temptress—and ends up killing the more emotional and dangerous one.
Masane learns that those women and many more like them are clone blades—eerily similar yet distinct imitations of her Witchblade form, bred and shaped over and over again to one day become strong enough for one of them to be able to seize and wield the true blade for the malevolent and God-like purposes of whoever controls them—of the second and third generation, formally known as Neogenes.
It is not just X-cons she has to worry about. Now she is looking left and right for suspicious stalkers and hunters after the Witchblade of both genders, and she makes sure that when an enemy is pursuing her to stray as far away from Riko as possible. She doesn’t know what she’d do if they got to her.
The battles she has with the X-cons get tougher and tougher. More and more people are being hunted and killed by them, and the police and detectives and website editors are more and more intrigued on how the deaths are happening and are starting to realize that the beings doing such crimes are not human.
Of course, to find the monsters will not be easy. The X-cons are able to possess the normalest of human forms and go between their true mechanic forms and disguises in an instant, and Tokyo has so many citizens with indistinguishable faces that Masane can only sniff out an X-con once it’s charging at her and ready to tear her apart, and even then, it’s only when they sense power emanating from either the Witchblade or its many clones.
The only one that was different was the one with the look of a mosquito. It had befriended Riko and managed to, unlike the rest of the monsters, obtain enough of its “human” self when in its true form, begging Masane to kill it so it could finally rest in peace—the X-con was once a human who was an officer that attempted to prevent a radio host, who gave him hope after his girlfriend was killed, from being kidnapped and killed by an obsessive fan-turned-stalker, only for it to backfire and he end up accused on stalking and thus fired from his job which thus led to him committing suicide—and be without misery.
She had stabbed it when the human side finally lost control and ran to kill Tozawa as he was taking pictures, and she was quiet when it crumbled to dust, the infamous feel of ecstasy and eroticism of blood and gore that her Witchblade form brought for once nonexistent.
When the next day had to go to Riko, who was waiting for the disguised human form of the X-con with a nicely and delicately wrapped bento in tow, it felt like needles had lodged and invaded their way into her heart and soul as she took her daughter away from the bench—Riko had left the homemade lunch on the bench so that, quote on quote, “The man even if late still has something to eat on his way home!”—and back to their house.
(Later that day, Masane picked up the bento and gave it to a homeless man that was nearby.)
When she kills masculine X-cons and clash with the feminine cloneblades now, there is something in her heart that tugs and claws and burns, makes it feel like she’ll bleed to death, makes it feel like she’s a step away from turning into an X-con herself and start feeding on human flesh and bones—
She’s fighting dead bodies of men and women made with the single purpose of bettering her and snatching away the Witchblade.
Men who have been murdered and killed and had their families grieving at their caskets are now turned into machines with only the knowledge of death and semi-cannibalistic food sources. Women who have analyzed every one of her punch and kick and sway of the mini-blades on her arm to come up with counterattacks tenfold as strong, who in one wrong move dissolve into crystalized material and are left to be a fallen soldier.
Masane isn’t a divine warrior to be blessed from the gods themselves with a glorious artifact to save the world from itself and have her names written in history books to be learned about decades from now—she’s a contestant picked to hold a sinister weapon of purgatorial means of ruin for as long as she can at least without meeting her end by the hands of the manipulated and the imitating.
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When it’s revealed that Riko is not her child and that the NswF were going to not only take Riko away from her but give her mother by the name of Reina Soho (the maternity journal was by the cloneblade, not Masane, it’s also revealed), who Masane later realizes is the primrose yamato nadeshiko like cloneblade, Masane is crushed.
Every step she takes feels like there is something chaining her and working its hardest to drag her into the ground and have her body engulfed into the flames of hell.
Her darling Riko—Rihoko Amaha, age 6 and with a love for cooking and making new friends—will never be in her hands again. The NswF have managed to remove Masane’s ties with Riko and of all people, the mother is one of her greatest enemies.
The Witchblade, which was said to of been a powerful force that's powers are envied by men that by default are forbidden from being one with it and desired by women who wish to use the artifact for their own means be it magnanimous or nefarious,
She’s so distraught by the news that Riko isn’t hers that she completely gives up—Reiji immediately reprimands her and tells her she needs to think about the future for Tokyo but she just can’t take it anymore—and as she’s sitting down and sulking practically thrusts her right hand at Reiji, telling him to do it, take it off, get the wretched Witchblade off of her and burn it all to the ground.
He grabs her by the wrist and throws her at the inside of his car in response.
After thirty minutes of her bickering and cussing him out for pulling her out of her apartment and apartment longue in front of all the other residents, them on the highway the whole time, he stops his car at a broken down building, tells her that he’s looked into what they’ve found of her past, and when they enter the place, inform her that they’re in the Natsukiseki Orphanage, where she lived for 17 years.
She asks about her parents and children, and he says that he could find nothing about it, but that he does know she and everyone else in the orphanage were on a field trip to Tokyo, and that all the busses they were in got crushed and swung around by the earthquake.
He also tells her that all the children and staff members except her either died instantly or survived and later succumbed to their injuries, sans a couple of the orphans and staff members that are reported to have not been killed but whereabouts are unknown and thus presumed dead. She is the only one left of almost 200 kids and 45 staff members.
They enter a room full of dust and cobwebs and playground sets that haven’t been touched or walked by since the disaster from six years ago, and there’s an unsolved Tangram puzzle-piece that she quickly attempts to solve and is able to put together, but one piece is missing from it, and she vows to search for it. Takayama does not follow her.
She goes down the hallways—this room’s empty, that room’s barren—until she reaches a coin locker room. Opening one locker, where only a dirty and cobwebbed covered tennis ball lays, she closes the door and looks to her left to see the next locker has the name Yasuka Ohara on it.
(Yasuka Ohara. That’s the name Takayama told her she was born with—Masane Amaha was just what the government chose to give her when they realized she would most likely never remember anything about herself before the Great Quake.)
When the brunette looks up, she sees a picture. She’s in it—she looks about 16—and a few other orphans ranging from about 8 or 9 to 16 and 17 are standing next to her.
Judging by the title on the frame, it was an annual event for the children in Natsukiseki Orphanage to take group pictures every early April, around the time of the Hanami festival. The pictures above in particular were taken in mid-February, a year before the earthquake that hurt Tokyo.
She’s happy in the picture, Yasuka Ohara. Her hair is longer and her outfit consists of a pale lilac blouse and mid length denim skirt, a simple white belt in between. To the left of her is a taller teen with his eyes closed and dark brown hair, and to the right of her is a pre-teen boy with unkempt pale-brown hair and with a gentle, soft version of a smile compared to Yasuka’s open mouth smile and one-winking-eye.
“The girl who lived here...she was the real me,” Masane says to herself with a solemn tone as her left fingers caress the name tag containing her original name, “but I don’t know her.”
Who was Yasuka Ohara? Was she a girl that enjoyed her life despite being parentless for all of her childhood and adolescence? Her facial expression in the photograph is so detailed and genuine in its glee, Masane doesn’t think that the her before the earthquake was someone suffering eternally.
Was she a girl who enjoyed making smiles appear on other people’s faces? Was she ambitious and had dreams to one day be adopted even as she reached the age of 17? Was she someone with siblings that lived with her in the orphanage? Was she someone who had talent in a subject, such as sewing or art? Was she able to have friends at the orphanage? Was she liked at Natsukiseki by the other orphans?
What job would she have had if she always stayed as Yasuka Ohara and not Masane Amaha? Would she ever have crossed paths with Rihoko Amaha, or would Rihoko Amaha be Rihoko Soho instead? If the witchblade became something detected in her around the time of the earthquake, would that mean that in a world where Yasuka Ohara never was in an earthquake and received enough blunt head trauma to the point of losing all memories, Yasuka Ohara would of never had to come into contact with the NswF and X-cons and Neogenes? Would Yasuka Ohara even be in a situation where she’d have to worry about having enough food on the table?
(When she has sex with Reiji that night for the first time, out of pent-up sexual tension and stress, it’s half-passionate. She spends half of it wondering what she could’ve been—what Yasuka could’ve been—and on if whatever will be of her life as Masane Amaha will be better or worse than what her life could’ve been if she had stayed as Yasuka Ohara, a girl from the Chiba prefecture that spent her whole infancy, childhood, and teenage years as an orphan of the Natsukiseki Orphanage.)
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The death of Reina (who Masane also finds out had a relationship with Takayama around the period she conceived and thus makes Riko his daughter, which she isn’t even going to attempt to go into the fuckery of that) and thus Riko returning to Masane’s custody should be the best thing for Masane. Masane should be happy and thanking the gods—or, rather, the Witchblade—for her darling Riko to not be in the hands of the NswF.
Masane, however, is anything but.
She learns first of a teenager named Maria, who according to Riko is Riko’s sister, and Maria according to the six year old is violent and volatile and vicious, quick to have snap and with a mentality so childish and impulsive, it’s more accurate to say that Riko is the deceased Reina’s teen daughter and Maria is the little child.
She learns second that the Witchblade did not choose her because it found her worthy to wield it and disperse the enemies that desire to control and manipulate it—it chose her because she was the closest, substantial enough temporary host to wield it until Riko, who the artifact truly wanted to control it, becomes of age.
Third, she learns that the Neogenes are genetically predisposed humans made with the DNA of Tatsuoki Furumizu, the head of NswF. According to Reiji, before the earthquake, Reina had worked with him on a collaboration research between the Douji Group Industries and the National Science & Welfare Company to gain information and knowledge on the Witchblade artifact, and beings such as her were created to be able to forcefully have the genetic requirements to wield it.
It was during this collaboration that Soho and Takayama fell in love and had intercourse.
Reina was decided to be the most compatible and during her pregnancy, which she was able to hide physically from Reiji and his industry but not her fellow Neogene sisters and Furumizu, she worried that Riko would be experimented on by the NswF. A few weeks after Riko’s birth, her worst fears came true—the NswF decided that they would wait for Riko to hit around 6 months and experiment on her.
Fearing for Riko’s safety, Reina stole the Witchblade from the chambers of the Douji Group Industries and attempted to run off, wearing the artifact on her left forearm as Riko was secured in both her left and right arms, but the machinery group and Reiji were one step ahead. They had cornered her on a bridge—Reiji was so focused on the Witchblade that he barely noticed that she had a baby in her hands, much less on who could’ve been the father—and attempted to seize control of her and the Witchblade when it had awakened and unleashed a massive power surge—
The Great Quake.
Reina’s desire to save both the Witchblade and Riko resulted in the earthquake that killed everyone Yasuka Ohara knew and loved as well as caused a massive change to the fate of Rihoko Soho, and sent both Masane Amaha and Rihoko Amaha into a spiral of chaotic and cruel events.
Finally, she learns that because the Witchblade becomes one with its hosts and intertwines with their organs and senses and body, it wears them down overtime and can only be removed in two ways:
The easier method is to cease the state of living—either by the Witchblade consuming all the components wielder or the wielder being killed in action, which is amplified in temporary hosts like Masane—and the harder method is to remove the arm that wields it, which leads to brain injury (Reiji had told her of a former wielder two people before her, Takeru Ibaraki, who shed off her arm to no longer be attached with the artifact and with it came the functions of her brain and state of thought) that is as dangerous as it is unrecoverable.
When Masane learns this, she is silent and only looks down at the floor.
She will not be forever with Riko, and whether she dies now or in the future when Riko becomes of age, the second Riko is a teenager, the Witchblade will claim her as its true full on host—
When that happens, how long will it take for Riko to live and die? She may be a fully intended future host, but what if the Witchblade deems her unworthy and wants another host that’s more stronger and formable? What if Riko, who is good with a knife with how much she makes sukiyaki and tonkatsu, decides to chop off her arm so she doesn’t have to be under its control—so she doesn’t have to kill her way to survive?
Riko will be the next host. Her Riko, her darling, darling Riko, will be the next host and will thus be chained to the Witchblade till death, never again being able to cook and read in peace.
Masane is going to die and her daughter is going to take over as host of the Witchblade once she becomes of age just to end up dying too. All Masane has sacrificed for Riko’s wellbeing will be for nothing.
(The Witchblade is a curse.)
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Break apart. Bleed out. Bend and spill out red over and over again. Bloat up with crimson and gush out fountains of scarlet for thy man and woman alike to dwell in and obtain but a fraction of such fine and intoxicating blood. Bear a bloodstained death upon the artifact birthed by the bonding divinity of the Angelus and the turpitude of the Darkness.
Bow down to the Witchblade in all of its integrity and die.
Die.
Die die die die.
Die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die—
“Masane.”
The transformed woman just gives a glance at the voice behind her with a scoff, blood all over her mouth, hands, and chest. She is in the upgraded form of her Witchblade transformation, pale gray hair and a ruby red suit, purple rectangular like markings on her face instead of curved magenta ones. Her eyes shine a toxic, ominous shade of pink.
“Masane,” the voice repeats again, this time with clear anger.
Stepping away from the many dead X-cons in front of her, Masane rolls her eyes and transforms back into her regular form with the Witchblade, where her hair is red, her scantily clad outfit is black, and her eyes shine the same yellow as the sun.
“What do you need? Are you here to entertain me with some nice bloodshed yourself?”
Reiji just looks at her and sighs. “You’ve been too violent with your approach to attacking enemies. Remember, the Witchblade feeds off of intense emotions, and the more you give off those intense emotions, the more it drains and controls you rather than you control it.”
The Chosen One rolls their eyes at the male again. Typical human, telling her once more something it’s told her over and over again.
“Yes, yes, I understand,” the artifact-wielder says, “so go along now and do whatever it is you people do in your spare time.”
Reiji gives a strange look before sighing and walking away, muttering about “emotions increasing lack of consciousness”.
The Chosen One knows that their emotions are causing their personality when in thy blessed Witchblade form to be more manipulated and circles around murderous intent than it would for more passive and calm hosts, especially because thy current host is but a temporary host, but what does it matter?
The current wielder’s life is being drained by it either way. That which has been gifted the artifact balanced by the light and darkness might as well get upon thyself higher amounts of strength when it all comes crashing down.
Thy redhead licks the scarlet substance off thy shielded hands. Its sweetness radiates as if it is Ichor from the gods themselves—
A DEUM DONO COEPERUNT, UT, CUM MASCULINO LIBRO DE BALANCETH ET TENEBRAE ILLUMINAT, UT ESSET PARTICEPS GIFT'D TIBI.
DID F'R PUGNATUR CONTRA INVIDIAM, NON-COMPATIBLE ET PER COLUS CONTENDUNT: NON SINEBAT HAS'T TE, EX OMNIBUS COLUS ET TEMPUS REI GERENDAE TO ME AD T TIMETH F'R ILLE SIMILLIMUS HORUM UOBIS HUNC ANNUM XXXV.
TIMETH TUUM STAT IN HAC INPOTENTIA SUBINTRAT IN NEAR POSTERUS, TANTUM INCOMMODUM IN INSIDIATORIBUS MEIS NE SESE CIRCUMEGERE. THEE, HOWEVER, AN ENSURETH QUOD MEUM EST VERUM, HOST RIHOKO TAKAYAMA ET PROGENIES DE OHE NON OBFUISSE, IN TE CONFIDÉNTIBUS ULTIMUM BATTLES.
SUETONIUS CONTROLETH BEEST IN RERUM OMNIUM PATREM ILLUD ERGO FILI HOMINIS ET FACIT QUOD ME PETIT.
—Masane crouches down and grabs at her head, pulling at her hair in frustration and taking large breaths, her pupils dilated and her mouth shivering. She recalls that she’s ingested blood and throws it all up in front of her, and transforms back to her regular self, where her hair is short brown and unruly and she has brown eyes that though with a dull color shine with passion.
Why can’t she remember being in control of her body for the last 20 minutes?
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Looking at the once sharp now bent and broken edge of the dagger in her left hand and glancing at the ruby jewel in the Witchblade bracelet on her right wrist, Masane breaks down crying.
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“Mommy will always love you, Riko,” Masane says as she holds her daughter tightly in her lap, stroking her blackish-purple hair. Riko giggles and plays with the bright pink flowers in her hands.
“I will always love you too, mommy.”
Sitting around a field of dianthus flowers—a field where she remembers Riko used to look for the prettiest flowers to give to Masane and Mariko and Mr. Cho and the less fortunate and so much more—Masane continues stroking her daughter’s hair, holding back a cough and pretending her eyesight didn’t just falter.
“Good. I will never stop loving you, Riko, never, and we will always be together....”
Her sweet, sweet Riko.
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Masane looks at the table of her apartment. A bottle of wine—she’ll have to reprimand herself later for not putting her alcohol on higher selves with stronger locks—is to her left and a bowl full of sauce to her right. Right at the front is a plate of white rice and a pair of chopsticks.
“Make sure you eat all of it, okay?” Riko tells her, staring at her with those beautiful almond orbs of hers again.
Sitting down, Masane grabs the chopsticks, makes them pick up a block of rice, dips it in all-purpose miso sauce, and puts it in her mouth.
“Oh, it’s so delicious! Like I said, Riko, your cooking is the best.”
Riko blushes and giggles. “I changed up the seasoning a little bit this time!”
“Well, that was a great choice,” Masane says between gulps of the traditional rice, “my sweet, little princess genius of the kitchen.”
Masane takes another spoon full of the food prepared for her, and the smile she gives Rihoko is so wide and able to convince the 6 year old that the upcoming major battle Masane will have will go fine and dandy and a-okay and that Masane is almost able to ignore the fact that she can neither smell the spices and vegetables from the sauce covering the rice or taste anything, no matter how many layers and layers of meat she nibbles on.
When Tozawa was in the apartment earlier just before Masane and Riko ate and she took a tiny piece of rice and told him after ingesting it that she had suddenly at that moment lost the ability to taste any food and even had issues smelling, Riko went to put something away in the kitchen, but now, Masane in front of her daughter as she eats.
She’s chugging down the food, drinking down the sauce like no tomorrow—but no matter how many things she shoves down her throat, it’s as if she’s never eaten it at all. Her smell is heading towards the same past as well, somewhat working one moment and the next as if she clogged it up.
She tries her best not to claw at the wretched Witchblade on her wrist. Even though she knows it's pointless, even though she’s tried in the past to stab and rip off and burn at the cursed jewel of the necklace, slammed the band of it into the wall constantly and constantly even as her knuckles bled and forearm bruised, she doesn’t do any of it.
No matter how much she screams and cries and begs, she knows that her fate is to fight to the death. If she tries to off herself now, not only will the Neogenes and X-cons continue to roam around and cause havoc but Riko, her darling, beautiful little girl with such an immense talent for cooking and a prodigy in the making, will have no one in immediate proximity with superhuman abilities to protect her if Maria and the rest of the Neogenes come back to kill her off or an X-con senses the power radiating from her and tries to consume her.
She won’t let that happen. She will fight to the death and make sure none of her enemies touch a single hair on Riko.
“Mommy, what are you thinking about?”
Blinking once, Masane looks at her daughter. Her small head is cocked to the left, and she is staring right at Masane. Masane rubs at the back of her own head.
“Oh, I’m just so, so hungry, and I think I’d like seconds of your delicious food, Riko,” Masane quickly lies to the child. She feels her stomach grumbling, and she knows it’s not just bile that’s going to come out.
Riko blinks once before she smiles wide. “I’ll get you some more food, then, mommy! For your upcoming battle, you have to be extra full.”
(When Riko turns around and gets off her seat, Masane coughs up the vomit, half-chewed food, and blots of blood that she’s been wanting to let out. She manages to cover it up by directing it into the bowl holding the orangish-red miso sauce.)
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Everything is falling apart.
Masane runs and leaps up in the sky as fast as she can, going quickly from her first Witchblade form, with blood-red hair and sharp yellow eyes, to her second form with hair as white as snow and pink eyes that radiate like toxic chemicals.
She has now gone colorblind. Everything around her is monochrome of black and white. She can only tell the difference between Douji Group Industries’ machine enforcements sent to aid her and the X-Cons because the X-Cons have been attempting to directly try and slash at her throat.
Buildings are falling apart all over. People are being crushed to death by everything around Tokyo, from the X-Cons, power surges from Neogenes and the Witchblade, and falling debris.
Masane sees a street that is about 5 or 6 blocks away from the nearby Tokyo Science Museum and stops for a breather. She knows she shouldn’t waste time and that every minute that passes by is another minute where her body is succumbing to the fate bestowed upon her by the Witchblade, but she still takes a break.
As she stands on that street, holding at her chest and wiping away the—mucus? blood? she can’t smell or tell—substance from her nose that she couldn’t detect but saw from the reflection of a nearby broken glass of a window, something unexpected happens.
For a second, a memory of her former life—the first time she’s ever had any recollection of that time come back to her since the Great Quake of six years ago—flashes through her mind.
She’s seventeen again. Everything around her is falling. A voice is screaming for her to go—to leave and escape and look for a man from America. Screams from children and teens ranging from the age of 6 to the age of 17 are heard. There is blood everywhere, and it is through these memories that her sense of smell and taste and vision returns.
She can smell injured and maimed flesh and blood. She can taste sprinkled blood not of her own on her tongue. She can see blood everywhere she goes, and a debris falling towards her. A few destroyed school buses are afar, and children and teens are running by, panicking and some without fingers or an arm.
One of the school busses has some windows open and there’s still people in it. She lowers herself down to the floor and crawls, crawls her way past remains of people and fallen buildings and ripped apart roads, and manages to get herself inside the large damage vehicle, where she sees a middle-aged man with glasses and holding a teen boy missing limbs, and the middle-aged man—“Yasuka! Yasuka! Yasuka!” he keeps screaming—reaches a hand towards her, and she to him, and she takes a few steps forward, but then, but then—
…
Masane hugs herself and bites down on her lip. She can’t see colors or smell the blood and dust of fallen buildings around her or taste her own saliva once more.
Despite the past few months of fighting against monsters made out of the deceased and clones made specifically to outdo and kill her, that memory she just had is one of the worst things she had seen.
There was so, so much blood….
If even I in my Witchblade form am traumatized, she wonders, how in the world did I as Yasuka Ohara handle it?
She’s afraid to find out the answer. All she knows is that she needs to head to her destination—and although she has lost most of her senses, she is able to detect that Maria and two other Neogenes are coming her way, ready to take the Witchblade from her and dominate the world.
She can’t let that happen. She won’t let anyone from the NswF, be them social workers or other Witchblade like fighters, make a future where Riko has no hope. She will not let all of the hard work she’s put into making sure Riko has a stable lifestyle die off in vain.
Even if it kills her, she will fight to ensure that the Witchblade and its enemies as well as allies on this very night do not ever harm Riko again.
The Witchblade may be hell wrapped in deceptive angelic feathers, but she will not let it triumph in deception, despair, any longer—
She will instill upon it deputation, whether it wants it or not.
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“Is mommy going to...die, Miss. Natsuki?”
Mariko solemnly pats Riko on the head. “No. Masane won’t die, Riko, she won’t.”
With their bags packed, the residents of the Natuski Building leave, and for once, there is no sound of laughter and drunkish banter in Marry’s Gallery Dining bar.
…
“Mommy’s going to...die, isn’t she, Mr. Takayama?” Riko asks once more, this time at a later time and to Reiji Takayama.
Takayama pats her head, and has a solemn face.
They stay quiet after that, and just watch Masane in her upgraded Witchblade form, blitzing through X-cons and Neogenes alike as she tries to get to her destination.
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Shatter.
“Did you love me...mother…?” Maria asks before she quickly turns and dissolves into crystal. Masane unextends her gauntlet’s blade from the teenager’s torso and says nothing as she looks down at the falling remains of the Neogene.
She walks past the nearby crystalized remains of Maria’s lackeys, Aoi and Asagi, and thinks about Maria’s delusion that Masane was Reina.
A mother’s love…
It’s funny how love from a mother can break or make a young girl.
She takes closer steps on top of Tokyo Tower, looking at all the broken down and damaged buildings and smaller skyscrapers below.
All around her, she only sees Tokyo in shatters. There is so much polluted air from the debris formed by falling buildings that she can barely see the buildings below.
Is this the Tokyo Riko will grow up in? Is this the environment Riko as a teenager and adult, if she is not killed by X-Cons or Neogenes or the Witchblade’s eventual breaking down of her body, will be spending running and shedding blood around? Is this the way Masane and Riko’s story with one another going to end? With Masane dead and the Witchblade waiting for another temporary host to launch unto until Riko is at a reasonable age, and then Riko to suffer the same fate as Masane and all the wielders before her?
Unacceptable.
Taking large leaps towards the top of Tokyo tower, Masane makes a decision.
iii: sound of grace
Her name is Masane Amaha, and she’s dying.
She’s holding her right arm as high in the air as possible, and pure divine light surrounds her as all the power from the X-Cons and Neogenes from Japan travel to the jewel on the Witchblade artifact.
The surroundings buildings from down below are contorted and half-destroyed. She’s standing at the top pointed center of Tokyo Tower, above all the chaos and commotion. She can feel parts of her hair already start to crumple off of her, and can feel the slow destruction of her ribcage and all the rest of the bones in her body.
Despite all Masane has done, she will not be able to physically continue on with her daughter.
She will not be able to leave tonight holding Riko’s small, fragile hands in her own. She will not be able to go to bed tonight with Riko in her arms, caressing her soft hair and singing half-remembered lullabies. She will not be able to spend tomorrow morning with her eyes shining bright as Riko makes tamagoyaki or soufflé pancakes.
She will not be able to be able to spend the next afternoon working and thinking about what clothes to get Riko as well as what nearby elementary schools she should apply the girl to—after all, she’ll be seven in a college of more months—or if she should think about getting more high-quality pans and pots for Riko to be able to make okonomiyaki and unagi no kabayaki.
She will not be able to return to the Natsuki Condominium Building tomorrow night and have playful arm wrestling battles against Mr. Cho, nor will she be able to hear an hour long lecture from Mariko about her not paying her rent on time, nor will she be able to listen to another nightly horoscope reading from Naomi before the black-haired woman sheepishly gives the next person a reading, nor will she be able to argue with Tozawa on if morning or afternoon scenery for pictures are better during the summer season.
She will not be able to get a sailor uniform in the future for Riko's first day of middle school, and she will not be able to get a blazer uniform in the future for Riko’s first day of high school. She will not be able to witness Riko enter and leave college, most likely graduating with a bachelors in culinary arts, and she will not be able to be sitting in a chair and sobbing tears of joy when Riko walks down the aisle.
Likewise, she will not be present physically if Riko ever decides to have a child of her own.
Riko will stay motherless. She was already without a mother due to Reina’s death, but with Masane dying, Riko will be without either of the two, and when the Witchblade searches and finds a nearby compatible woman to temporarily be intertwined with until Riko comes of age, if that next host decides to raise Riko, the host will die when it’s time for Riko’s ascension to the Witchblade as well.
Her darling, darling Riko, forced to fend herself from the wolves among sheep.
That is a future Masane had, has, and will have always refused to let happen. She will not allow Riko to live the rest of her life waiting for the day she becomes the next host of the Witchblade and slowly lose her body to the artifact.
That is why Masane will use the last of her strength to remove the Witchblade from existence.
...
The Witchblade...is it the righteous sword of God, or hand of the Devil himself?
Ever since she has started to use the Witchblade, Masane has thought this to herself over and over again.
She originally saw the Witchblade as a gift from the heavens, an answer to the prayers she had spent the last half of the decade making, a solution to all the dilemmas and issues that raising Riko caused—
Very quickly, however, she saw the maliciousness of the artifact and what being in usage of it truly meant for the women it used as hosts. The fate that so many women before her—as well as possibly after her if she fails in her goal—have been forced to endure because of its conditions. The way it slowly breaks down the body and leaves it to be nothing more than a washed-up, used up source of now gone power and food.
Yet, despite with all its flaws, she has been able to die the first time keep a roof over Riko’s head, finally be able to push back against the welfare agents and social workers that attempted time and time again to rid her of her custody of Riko, able to find at least some clues on who she was before the Great Quake even if it’ll always be a mental blur, be someone to save the day and stop thousands of people from dying each night...
It is with that knowledge of the positives and cons that she is able to come up with a conclusion—
The Witchblade is not entirely from the hands of the God above himself or the bloody intentions of the Devil down below—it is a balance of them both, holding in it both the beauty of the many wonders of the world as well as the cruelty of it.
It circles as much love as it does hatred, joy as it does sorrow, and Masane will tilt the scale and make it lean towards. by taking the Witchblade with her. It is the best possible option.
She will take the Witchblade with her, and disperse with it into a purgatorial like afterlife in the abyss with the knowledge that not only Riko will be spared the fate of being the host for the Witchblade but that all women, both living in the present and those that will be born in the future, will never have to spend their teenage and adult years with the change that they’ll be dragged into the world of the Witchblade, its imitations, and its hunters.
There are still many questions Masane has—how her life as an orphan went, if she and Takayama were a thing out of pure love or if he used her as a replacement for the deceased Reina, if Riko will eventually be able to get over her death by the time the six year old reaches her teenage years, if so much of the drama surrounding the Witchblade could of been avoided and never affect Masane or Riko at all of Masane had traveled to another prefecture instead of the prefecture of Tokyo, and so much more, but Masane is fine with never hearing or seeing the answers to those questions.
Her Riko, her darling, darling Riko, will be saved and pushed away from the fate of the Witchblade’s wielders, which triumphs all the other factors of Masane’s life, even more so than Masane’s life as Yasuka, and although she may not have all her memories or senses like she did before the Great Quake, there is one thing that she as Masane Amaha will always have that she as Yasuka Ohara did not have the day of the disaster in Tokyo six years ago—
The ability to put an end to the disaster around her.
“Mo...MOOMMMMMYYYY!” a strained, young voice shouts. Masane turns and sees Riko, standing at a building down below, an expression of pure confusement and sorrow on her small face. It is then that Masane is finally able to see colors again, if only for one last time.
Using the last of her abilities, Masane mentally speaks to Riko—she’s not surprised that it works. After all, she has always been able to sense where her darling, darling Riko is and how she feels, as if they are able to be united whenever and wherever even without a phone in hand and even if Masane’s time is up.
Riko, I will always be by your side, Masane telepathically tells the six year old quivering child, but this life...this isn’t where you’re supposed to be. It’s there, right beside you.
At that moment, Reiji comes stumbling from a half-ruptured wall, his troubled face turning into one of relief. A single bead of sweat comes down his right eyebrow, following the line of the scar that covers it.
Masane sees Riko point at her and say something and then sees Reiji hold her small hands before Masane turns back around and collects the remaining nearby powers of X-cons and Neogenes.
With closed eyes and a long, gentle smile, Masane finalizes her decision by putting in all of her own power and energy, caring not that she goes past her limit and begins to feel hollowness inside where organs and blood and whatnot should be.
“Riko…”
With a smile on her face, Masane dissolves into the light, the necklace around her neck floating up and down as she does.
Riko will not suffer the same fate. The last wielder of the Witchblade made sure of it—both as Yasuka Ohara and Masane Amaha.
✦
✦ † ✦
✦
Standing still next to her crouching father and looking beyond, where the Tokyo Tower, Masane, and the Witchblade no longer exists—nearby helicopter reporters are screaming and going on and on about how the X-come and Neogenes wreaking havoc have vanished from this earth as well—Riko looks at the small balls of light coming towards her with sadness.
One particular ball of light comes falling down in front of her, and she cups her hands and rises them up to catch it.
All the luminous flare around it disperses at once and turns into a pretty pink seashell—one that looks exactly the same as the one she got for her now dead adopted mother when they went to a beach weeks ago—which she holds deeply to her chest as she looks up to the sky with a happy albeit bittersweet expressions.
“Mommy...”
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There is a 21 year old woman by the name of Rihoko Amaha, who is as good of a cook as she is wise and perceptive, and every time she returns home, whether after a day of classes at Tokyo University—to get a degree in culinary arts—or after her night shift at the Marry’s Gallery Dining Bar, she greets her father Reiji Takayama cheerfully and makes a prayer or two to a pretty pink seashell she found years ago that nowadays she places in a special glass jewelry box on top of her bedroom’s mirror-dresser, and she is always happy.
[END.]
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